How I learned to stop worrying and love the firewall

Abstract

R’s open-source communities have built robust package-frameworks that “just work”. CRAN is a well-celebrated example; devtools makes it easier for us to install and develop packages using public GitHub repositories. RStudio Connect and its underlying packages, rsconnect and packrat, work intuitively if all the packages you use are on either CRAN or public GitHub.

However, if you are working in a corporate environment to develop private packages, this may no longer be the case. I present a set of workarounds that work well for me: using devtools and usethis to develop and deploy packages on GitHub Enterprise, and using drat to maintain a CRAN-like repository within our firewall.

These workarounds are distilled into a new package: ghentr, whose goal is to make it easier for you to build and share a private package-ecosystem using your instance of GitHub Enterprise.

About the speaker

Ian LyttleSenior Staff Engineer

Ian Lyttle is a data scientist whose background is mechanical engineering, with an emphasis on computational fluid-dynamics. He started using R in 2011 and quickly became an enthusiast for what is now the Tidyverse. He enjoys exploratory data-analysis: starting with a “pile of data” then working towards insights. He is the author of packages vembedr and bsplus, as well as a contributor to Tidyverse, R-Lib, and other packages and projects. At Schneider Electric, he works with experts on power-distribution and building-operation to help them answer questions using data collected by power meters and building-automation systems.